How to read faster

You read faster when you know what you want from a text and nothing pulls your mind away from the page. Here are six things you can do on the next thing you read.

1. Decide what you need before you start. Ask yourself: what do I want from this? It may be one fact, the main points, or every detail. Your answer tells you how much of the text you have to read.
2. Look it over first. Take two minutes. Read the title, the headings, the first paragraph and the last one. Now you know what the text is about, so the pages in between are easier to follow.
3. Put your phone in another room. Every time you look at a message, you lose your place, and it takes a while to get back into what you were reading.
4. Read the first sentence of every paragraph. It often tells you what the whole paragraph is about. When you only need the main points, read those and move on.
5. Slow down where it matters. When you reach a part you need to know well, read every word at your normal pace. Going back over a hard sentence is fine.
6. In a hurry? Read it on paper. If you have to get through something quickly and still understand it, print the pages that matter.

Over months and years, your pace goes up when you read more: see how to read more.

Skim when you only need the main points, and read every word when you need the details. The table shows which to use for four kinds of text.

For a book you want to understand well, see how to read a book.

Speed reading does not work the way the courses and apps say it does. When they were tested, the people who read much faster understood less of what they read (Rayner and colleagues, 2016). The reading speed test page goes through each speed reading claim, and it measures your own pace.

Reading the right parts, keeping your mind on the page and using paper when you are in a hurry all help. Here is what researchers found.

People who skim the whole text remember more of the main points.

In one experiment, students had only enough time to read half of a long article. With one article they read only half, line by line. With another they skimmed all of it. After skimming, they remembered more of the main points, though not more of the small details (Duggan and Payne, 2009). When they skimmed, their eyes spent most of the time on the first part of each paragraph.

Readers whose minds wander understand less.

Researchers put together the results of many studies of people reading. The readers whose minds wandered more often understood less of the text (Bonifacci and colleagues, 2023). That does not prove that one causes the other, but it is a good reason to move your phone before you start.

When time is short, people take in more from paper.

Other researchers put together studies in which people read the same texts on paper and on a screen. People understood a little more on paper, and the difference was bigger when they had a time limit (Delgado and colleagues, 2018). The difference showed up for texts that explain or inform, and not for stories.

Every source below was read for this page: the first two in full, and the summary of the last two.

1. Duggan, G. B. and Payne, S. J. (2009). Text skimming: the process and effectiveness of foraging through text under time pressure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(3), 228 to 242.
2. Bonifacci, P., Viroli, C., Vassura, C., Colombini, E. and Desideri, L. (2023). The relationship between mind wandering and reading comprehension: a meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 30(1), 40 to 59.
3. Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R. and Salmerón, L. (2018). Don’t throw away your printed books: a meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension. Educational Research Review, 25, 23 to 38.
4. Rayner and colleagues (2016). So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

The pages an hour are our own sum, from the averages in Brysbaert, 2019.